Darknet Diaries shares statistics for 2019; Procast adds donate buttons

• Above: PodcastOne Australia is currently advertising their podcasts across the non-burning bits of the country, including this billboard photographed at Gepps Cross SA. (HT: our personal supporter Radionotes)

• Jack Rhysider has shared the statistics for his podcast Darknet Diaries in 2019. He highlights the main reasons why the podcast has significantly increased in downloads; the apps that downloaded his podcast, and Patreon revenue.

  • Here’s how ours did this year - as we say, our podcast’s good, but our newsletter’s better.

• Procast, a German podcast app, now supports the donation button, joining apps like Overcast. (They’ve chosen an excellent example). We’ve updated our page on how to add a 'donate’ button.

• The new Chinese government podcast we linked to yesterday? Yang Yi from JustPod looked into it: it’s on Ximlaya, and is called 物种100·贵州智慧 - Species 100: Guizhou Wisdom. However: it’s an audiobook, and not a podcast. “When Xinhua News Agency translated the original release into English, it just borrowed the word 'podcast’, which may be easier to understand in the Western world. But it caused huge misunderstandings.”

  
  Aug 20 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• The Global Awards, run by UK media company Global, are to return with a new category for best podcast. Fifteen podcasts are selected for public vote, not all made by the company.

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• A reminder of the power of word of mouth: someone on Reddit has just discovered podcasts. “I’ve seen that little Podcasts icon on my phone for years and never once was tempted to click it before. I just clicked it because someone told me I could listen to the Dirty John podcast there. … I can hardly believe it’s free. The content of the podcasts seems to be all quality stuff and there are hardly any commercials.” (HT: Paul Bae)

  
  Aug 20 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Telegram, a chat service, appears to have enhanced its support for playing “podcasts” - at least, when playing audio files over 20 minute duration sent via the app.

• PRX look forward to a decade of podcast possibilities. In the article, a photograph of their boardroom table, which is possibly the coolest boardroom table you’ll see.

• The Boston Globe opines: In the future, everyone will have their own podcast for 15 minutes

Developer corner

• Good news: Google Podcasts on the web appears to have changed its error message for podcasts that don’t exist: reverting to a standard Google error (though unfortunately with an HTTP 200 OK header). Searching the 300KB (!) of HTML returned for <title>Error 404 seems to have the required effect. We’ve added our check back to our podcast pages, and our podcast availability overview.

Privacy: Our podcast player within our podcast pages was grabbing jQuery from a Cloudflare-hosted CDN, which was attempting (but failing) to set a cookie. This was not detailed in our privacy policy. We’re now hosting jQuery ourselves. Sorry.

Podcast News - with Spreaker Prime

Spreaker Prime: Everyone knows that communication is the key to success. But what does that actually mean? On the Talk to Amber Podcast, communication expert and certified life coach, Amber L. Wright, breaks down how to communicate with confidence and clarity in everyday situations. She’s using Spreaker Prime to increase exposure and maximize monetization.

Rocketship is back for a new season. It’s a business podcast that has brought stories and advice to the startup community for the last 6 years: this season is all about product failure, like Google+, Webvan, and… Audible. (Rocketship / The Podglomerate / Megaphone)